Case Studies of Digital Humanities Pedagogy

http://services.pepperdine.edu/techlearn/tools/ipadresearch.htm

Lisa Spiro March 2, 2013

“Student-Writers” to “Student-Authors”

“It is our experience that the closer we can bring our students to the real sources of knowledge — the ancient texts, the archaeological remains, the papyri and parchment — and the real reward of scholarship — the joy of producing a piece of work that one knows will be discovered and read with interest and pleasure by people we may never meet — the closer we can bring students to the experience of being true scholars, working beside other scholars, the more enthusiasm we find.”

Blackwell, Christopher, and Thomas R. Martin. “Technology, Collaboration, and Undergraduate Research.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 1 (Winter 2009). http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/003/1/000024/000024.html.

Undergraduate Research and the Homer Multi-Text

http://www.homermultitext.org/

"We have developed working relationships with these students, looking at them as collaborators” (faculty member)

“I find it fantastic that our research is contributing to this huge collection of data, and that it will be part of a foundation for new, innovative research on Homer” (student)

Approaches to digital (humanities) pedagogy

Promote undergraduate research

Develop digital literacies

Promote play, creativity, collaboration & problem solving

Foster social learning

1. PROMOTE UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH

Undergraduate Work in the Humanities Redefined

http://hastac.org/blogs/jenrajchel/revising-definition-undergraduate-work-rehumanities-national-undergraduate-symposiu

undergraduate work (n): a paper which consists of summarizing and filtering theoretical articles, with textual evidence

undergraduate work (n): the culmination of collaborative and independent research resulting in a curative and analytic project (v): to interrogate boundaries, text, and media through theory, experience, and reflection

Adventures in Digital History: Jeff McClurken, U of Mary Washington

http://jmpolitoons.umwhistory.org/

“be uncomfortable but not paralyzed”

“Generative Scholarship”: Student Work at Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab

Multimodal Arguments: Lauren Close’s Digital Independent Study

http://independent-study.laurenclose.org/

Making Work Visible: Re:Humanities

http://news.haverford.edu/blogs/rehumanities/

“[DH] projects empower undergraduate students to take themselves and their academic work seriously, in part by making this work more publicly available” (Stephanie Cawley)

2. DEVELOP DIGITAL LITERACIES

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bw/2516698553/

Pedagogy for Abundance

“As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information…They need to move from being simply knowledgeable, to being knowledge able; to examine, question, and even recreate the increasingly digital structures that shape our world.”

--Michael Wesch [emphasis added]

cf From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments

Mike Wesch’s Pedagogy in Action: Digital Ethnography

http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Digital_Ethnography

Brian Croxall’s Mapping Mrs. Dalloway Assignment

Digital Storytelling as Layered, Multimodal Narratives

Jessie Poole and Cathryna Brown, Missing in Action (The Charlestown Project)

3. PROMOTE PLAY, CREATIVITY, COLLABORATION & PROBLEM SOLVING

http://www.flickr.com/photos/edublogger/8071798950/

Pedagogy of Play and Experimentation: Alan Liu, Literature +

Romeo and Juliet: A Facebook Tragedy

“Designing New Ways of Knowing”: UCLA Knowledge Design Studio (KDS)

• Focus on “novel, real-world” problem

• Collaborate across disciplines, age groups

• Produce something tangible:

– digital textbook about Sunset Blvd

– Mobile app for mapping street signs

Students “experiment with solutions for mapping Baltimore street signs”

4. FOSTER SOCIAL LEARNING

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dailypic/1459055735/

Building Community through Class Blogs

http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/teach/teaching-the-introductory-course-harbison-waltzer/

• Active • Social • Open • Meta-

cognitive • …

Networked Pedagogy: Looking for Whitman

http://lookingforwhitman.org/

“experiment in multi-campus digital pedagogy” (Jim Groom)

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonlucas/204213403/

Challenges to Digital Humanities Pedagogy

• Incorporating digital skills into a crowded course schedule

• Providing appropriate technical support to students

• Evaluating student work

• Acquiring skills yourself

Incorporating Digital Projects into the Curriculum

• Consider scale: one day, one assignment, or an entire course? (You may want to start small)

• Tie your assignment to particular pedagogical goals

• Introduce students to possible ways to realize the project, but give them latitude

• Use existing platforms, such as History Engine or HyperCities

Providing Technical Support

• Use simple, freely available tools

– See Bamboo DiRT (Digital Research Tools) for examples

• Offer occasional labs focused on particular skills

• Partner with IT and library (e.g. Zach Coble and Eric Remy)

• Appoint student tech leads to provide peer learning

• Turn to the network:

– Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

Evaluating Student Work: Use a Group Contract

Components:

1. Mission statement

2. Tools

3. Division of labor and structure

4. Milestones

http://dh2010.umwblogs.org/group-contracts/mary-ball-washington-contract/

Evaluating student work: Use a rubric (e.g. AAC&U VALUE Rubric)

Acquiring the skills yourself

• Play

• Work on your own pilot project

• Attend a workshop, e.g. Digital Humanities Summer/Winter Institute, THATCamp, NEH Institute

• Consult online guides & tutorials

– See my “Getting Started in the Digital Humanities”

How Digital Humanities Can Benefit Learning

• Supports authentic, inquiry-driven learning

• Facilitates undergraduate research projects

• Enables students to have a public impact

• Fosters collaborative, social learning

• Empowering; promotes creative confidence

• Promotes greater understanding of the digital environment in which we operate

• Promotes interdisciplinary, integrative thinking & doing

Small Group Work

• Examine an assignment from a digital humanities class with an eye toward how you might implement something similar in your own classes. Use the positives, potentials, concerns, opportunities framework to assess the assignment. Group 1: Text analysis Group 2: Studio learning Group 3: Digital collections/ digital history Group 4: Visualizing time Group 5: Digital mapping